SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Dominoes clacking hard against tabletops punctuate
the dragging hours of downtime in the little tent city growing at the entrance
to Puerto Rico's drab, concrete elections warehouse.

The party faithful and the political junkies can be excused for taking
breaks from sign-waving and sloganeering -- the recount they have come
to monitor has turned into an endless ordeal of stops and starts, all-night
court hearings, and finger-pointing bluster. Nearly 1 1/2 months since
the Nov. 2 election, Puerto Rico still does not know the identity of its
next governor, and this island, where some feel like second-class citizens
dominated by a colonial power, is seething with long-standing tensions
over federal control.

The recount has drawn all-too-obvious comparisons to the Bush v. Gore
saga, though lawyers here say the sheer volume of courtroom time for the
Puerto Rico election contretemps now far exceeds the judicial time expended
to decide the U.S. presidential race four years ago. Puerto Rico has added
considerable flourishes to recount lore: Handwriting experts are on call
to study the pencil-marked X's that signify votes on its antiquated ballots.
Vote counters have staged walkouts and threatened to strike. Allegations
of a ruthless gang rigging the votes of prisoners -- who are allowed to
vote -- have been floated.

Political activists have begun to fret that the mess will not be cleaned
up in time to inaugurate the new governor and new legislature next month,
leaving the island without a functioning government. Regardless, Anibal
Acevedo Vila, the pro-commonwealth candidate who led on election night,
has done his best to appear the confident winner, even taking his children
to the governor's mansion -- an ornate 16th-century fort in Old San Juan
known as "La Fortaleza" -- to choose their bedrooms.

The emotions of the case are stoked almost daily by the heated rhetoric
of a monumental tug of war between Puerto Rico's Supreme Court and the
island's U.S. District Court, which could begin to be untangled in a federal
appeals court hearing scheduled to begin Monday in Boston. U.S. District
Judge Daniel Dominguez, who said here that "I am not a happy camper" when
he seized control of the recount from the Puerto Rico Supreme Court, called
the case "the biggest federal confrontation with a state in the history
of this country."

Judicial hyperbole aside, the recount has huge ramifications. Pedro
Rossello, the pro-statehood candidate, has promised that he will deliver
Puerto Rican statehood within four years. His strategy, he said, will be
to sue the U.S. government by making a civil rights claim using the same
legal principles as the school-desegregation cases of the 1950s. He would
argue that Puerto Rico is a victim of "geographic segregation" because
it has no voting member of Congress and no electoral votes in presidential
elections.

Rossello, a retired pediatric surgeon who served two terms as governor
from 1993 to 2000, is plagued by ethics questions because several dozen
members of his administration and campaign staff have been indicted on
corruption charges.

"What we have is the person who was the head of the most corrupt government
in the history of Puerto Rico trying to steal the election," Acevedo Vila
said in an interview at his campaign headquarters here.

Rossello, in an interview at his campaign headquarters a few miles away,
countered that his opponent "hasn't stolen the election yet, because it
isn't over yet." He added: "But the intent to steal the election is certainly
there."

Complaints about judicial favoritism are everywhere. Each candidate,
voters half-joke, has his personal judge. When Rossello was governor he
supported Dominguez's nomination to the federal bench by President Bill
Clinton. Photographs of Rossello and Dominguez hugging at a judicial conference
have aired repeatedly on television news programs, though the former governor
dismissed allegations of favoritism with a wave of his hand. "We're very
physical here in Puerto Rico -- no big deal." At the same time, Rossello's
political backers like to point out that Acevedo Vila was a law clerk for
the chief justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court, whose rulings have
favored the pro-commonwealth candidate.

While the candidates trade insults and radio commentators rant about
the recount, hundreds of election workers are laboriously poring over 1.9
million paper ballots splayed over dozens of folding tables on the floor
of the election warehouse here. Like any self-respecting recount, Puerto
Rico's has added at least one new word to the island vocabulary: pivaso.
The pivaso has turned into Puerto Rico's butterfly ballot.

A pivaso is a ballot split between the pro-commonwealth party -- whose
emblem is Puerto Rico's traditional flouncy peasant hat, the pava -- and
the tiny PIP party, which advocates complete independence for the island.
Traditionally, votes cast for the pro-commonwealth ticket, the Popular
Democratic Party, were known as pavasos. Hence, a vote split between the
PIP and the party of the pavasos became a pivaso.

The question at the center of the recount is whether the estimated 28,000
pivaso ballots are legal under Puerto Rico's curious election law. Rossello's
legal team says they are not and should be thrown out; Acevedo Vila's lawyers
say they are and should be counted.

The dispute is born of Puerto Rico's archaic paper ballots; there are
no voting machines here. Puerto Ricans vote, as they have for decades,
by writing a large X in pencil on their ballots. Each party's symbol is
also on the ballot, a leftover tradition from a time when many Puerto Ricans
were illiterate and could only identify their candidates by spotting the
party emblems. Voters are only given pencils, but mysteriously some ballots
have ended up with marks written in pencil and pen, raising suspicions
of tampering.

Rossello's attorneys -- led by Theodore B. Olson, who represented George
W. Bush in the Bush v. Gore case and became U.S. solicitor general -- say
pivaso ballots should be thrown out because they are marked by three X's,
one each for the PIP party, for Acevedo Vila and for the pro-commonwealth
candidate for resident commissioner. Rossello argues that Puerto Rico's
voting rules allow only two X's on a ballot. Acevedo Vila's legal team
-- led by another lawyer who represented Bush in 2000, Charles J. Cooper,
and by Charles Fried, a solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan
-- says three X's are legal.

The pivaso votes are the result of a daring and unprecedented political
maneuver by Acevedo Vila, who now serves as Puerto Rico resident commissioner
or nonvoting member of Congress. Acevedo Vila urged members of the Independent
Party -- who represent about 5 percent of the electorate -- to vote for
him and for their party. His plea held some appeal to Independentistas
because Puerto Rican political parties need a minimum number of votes to
remain on the ballot and qualify to receive money from the island's electoral
fund.

Whichever side wins the pivaso argument will probably win the election.
Rossello's campaign also is clinging to the slim possibility that the recount
will produce enough of a change for him to not only overcome Acevedo Vila's
3,800-vote margin on election night but also establish a large enough margin
of victory of his own to make the pivaso ballots irrelevant.

U.S. District Judge Dominguez opened a path for this outcome when he
overruled the Puerto Rico Supreme Court and ordered that undisputed ballots
should be counted first, leaving disputed ballots to be counted later.

"Continental" courts, as some here are fond of calling the federal judiciary,
are sure to have a big say in what happens, and almost everyone here expects
the route to the governor's mansion in San Juan to run through the appeals
court in Boston.

Earlier this year, during the Major League Baseball playoffs, Rossello
got a call from his son in Las Vegas that now seems symbolically prophetic
to him. Rossello remembers telling his son that 2004 was Boston's year
and that the Red Sox would win the World Series. Rossello gave his son
a bit of prescient advice that he hopes could be applied with equal success
to his aspirations for a political comeback: Bet on Boston.